WASHINGTON ? The wheels on the bus go round and round?and deliver fresh produce to D.C. residents in so-called ?food deserts.?
By late October, the non-profit Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food and Agriculture plans to launch a Mobile Market, a decommissioned school bus retrofitted as a farmers market on wheels, and also plans to accept food stamps, HuffingtonPost.com/DC writes.
?As a nonprofit farm and sourcing directly from it, we have that luxury and we want to also provide food as affordably as possible,? Mobile Market manager Benjamin Bartley, a Culinary Institute of America graduate, told the news source.
Michael Babin, founder of Arcadia, purchased a 28-foot school bus from a used-car lot in Maryland to accommodate the mobile market. It?s being retrofitted with shelving, a retractable awning, refrigerators, freezers and a new engine that can accommodate biodiesel.
Bartley, chef turned bus driver, recently got a commercial driver?s license and is meeting with neighborhood leaders to assess the D.C. areas where unemployment and poverty levels are high. He told the news source that during the mobile bus?s first year, the focus would be on D.C. neighborhoods with plans to eventually expand into Maryland and Virginia.
?The whole idea for this bus is to work myself out of a job,? Bartley said, adding, ?I want to come into these neighborhoods, cultivate the demand where there isn't access to the food, and then hopefully corner stores or grocery stores can take that baton and continue supplying that demand and I can take the bus elsewhere.?
Going to the NACS Show in two weeks? You can learn more about mobile vending at the workshop ?Food on the Move: Thinking Outside Your Walls? on Saturday, Oct. 1 at 1:30 pm.
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